


between the saltmarsh and the sea

by TheGoodDoctor



Series: stately progress through the stars [2]
Category: Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
Genre: And yet, Angst, Established Relationship, Multi, Pining, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, further victorian inability to express emotion aided by destiny and repression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 03:22:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20828570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGoodDoctor/pseuds/TheGoodDoctor
Summary: They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.





	between the saltmarsh and the sea

William surfaces slowly from sleep, rising slowly into an already-golden morning from the depths of slumber with a calm, dozy blankness that he cannot immediately blink away. He has turned in the night so that he opens his sleep-dazed eyes upon a fuzzy dark plait, and he traces the line of it to a beautiful smile turned upon a suntanned face propped up on a worker’s palm, and he’s smiling before his head has really caught up to who these people are. He cannot be certain that his head will  _ ever _ catch up to why they are in his bed, but for now he is quite content to smile helplessly in sleepy disbelief.

Gabriel catches him looking and reaches out to card his fingers through William’s hair. The curls, matted into stubbornness by a night’s inattention, put up a strong defence, and so Gabriel’s fingers simply sink into them and remain still. He, William, presses absently into the points of pressure and closes his eyes like a cat. “Good morning,” Gabriel says, gently amused. William manages half of a humming mumble that could, if one were feeling charitable, be called a greeting in return and smiles when Bathsheba wraps her fingers around his palm. He can feel the warmth of her smile from here, humming through the cascading blooms and leaves stretching down his chest, and much as he loves watching her smile he loves yet more the comforting certainty of the connection thrumming across his skin.

“Morning, love,” Bathsheba sing-songs teasingly, tugging gently on his hand until he rolls over onto his belly, arm trapped beneath him and Gabriel’s hand pulling not unpleasantly in his tangled hair, and now he has the length of his body pressed to Bathsheba’s side. William has had too many years of lying alone: despite their assurances, he worries that he will somehow contrive to crush his lovers in his sleep, smother them with over-keen limbs, drown Bathsheba or Gabriel in his wild curls; and so he holds them until their breathing evens, gentle and slow like the waves at low tide, and then William sprawls in safe solitude on the far side of their bed. It’s fine. Better this way, even.

But this waiting at night snatches moments from the morning. “It’s time,” Gabriel says solemnly, and William’s eyes snap open against the pillow. It is a good thing that Gabriel can never be persuaded on this matter, else Bathsheba and William would keep him pinned here forever, and it should not really be a surprise, as Gabriel leaves them early every morning and William’s sleep-addled eyes are now reporting that they had seen him fully-dressed when they first opened; and yet William’s first instinct is still startled upset and a half-formed protest bubbling behind his teeth.

Bathsheba pouts and Gabriel carefully kisses it away, gentle and tender as he always is. Gabriel’s is a cautious, protective love, and it keeps them safe: from heartbreak, from the outside world, from William’s own too-grasping, too-clinging love. William’s love forces his uncooperative arms beneath him to push him up, ready to protest; Gabriel’s love untangles his fingers from William’s hair before it hurts him and rubs a thumb slowly along the line of his jaw, and then seals in his denial with soft, slightly chapped lips pressed to his own, tender but allowing no argument. William props himself on one elbow, clinging to Bathsheba with one hand and with the other clawing for purchase on Gabriel’s waistcoat shoulder to press in, deeper, demanding more and more and-

Gabriel breaks apart from them, leaning their foreheads together to catch his breath. “Good morning,” Bathsheba says beneath them, voice warm and teasingly slow-sweet like treacle in the sun, like shared cider in the evening, like their bedsheets and the dark and what happens within. Gabriel grins at her appreciation but William goes bright red, flaring up in awkward too-much too-fast too-early embarrassment. His eyes shutter closed as Bathsheba runs her knuckles down his cheek, probably feeling enough warmth there to burn her hand, but she doesn’t pull away until Gabriel has, finally, leant back and left William to flop back into the pillows and in them hide.

“Come for breakfast, will you?” Bathsheba says as Gabriel makes his escape from their little secure Eden. He must nod, because the door clicks quietly closed and she squeezes William’s hand gently. “There,” she says softly, gently combing and separating his curls with her other hand. “Only half an hour, and then we shall all be together again.” He opens one eye and fixes it on her -  _ but it isn’t the same. _ Bathsheba raises an eyebrow. “Have you considered, dear William, sleeping and waking at the same time as Gabriel and I?” His open eye narrows in his only concession to this well-worn argument, and she sighs, and he regrets it. Bathsheba rolls away from him and out of his grasping reach, swinging her legs over the bed and stretching expansively. The sun silhouettes her slightly through the thin cotton of her nightshirt, the dark lines of willow and rue on her shoulders tantalisingly half-visible as she shifts, and William longs to stretch as far as he can and further across the seemingly vast expanse of white sheets and just brush his fingertips down the curve of her spine. But then he would wrap his heavy hands around her hipbones and pull her back to him and curl around her until Gabriel, worried, comes looking for them and William can throw an arm out like a snare and haul him into his lair, half lying on them like a dragon on its gold with his arms cast out to mantle over them like a hawk protecting its catch.

William cannot quite trust himself to have only a touch without grabbing too many handfuls, so he rolls away onto his back and watches her dress from afar.

He watches, propped up on pillows, as she frowns at the bow lost in the neckline of her combinations. The mirror allows him both to see her furrowed brow, tongue in her teeth as she fusses with the ribbon, and to watch her plait slowly unravel like a shadow falling across the planes of her back. If he had been asked, before, what he would most like about being married, William is not sure what he would have said: companionship, possibly - an end to his loneliness. He wouldn’t have said  _ watching my wife fuss over hooks and eyes as she fights her way into a corset of a morning. _ She curses softly under her breath and he smiles, flooded with fondness.

The movement catches her eye in the mirror and Bathsheba grins. “Do you see something that interests you, sir?” she says, teasing both with her voice and the hand that the mirror shows sliding down the gently curving boning towards her hips, spreading her palm flat against her stomach and taking an intentionally deep breath that make his eyes catch too long on the pale expanse of skin between cloth and curling leaves.

He flushes for the second time, tearing his eyes away from the fond and laughing woman in the glass. “Well, if you will insist on being interesting,” he grumbles, voice rusted from lack of use and choked slightly by guilty shame.

His eyes fixed on the corner of the room to prevent their wandering, William does not see Bathsheba fight her way into her petticoats and is only aware of it when she rustles into his line of sight and drops a kiss to his temple. “We’re interesting people,” she agrees, thumbing the creases at the corner of his eye. “We should tell Gabriel about it this evening.”

It’s a promise she leaves him with, buttoning herself into her dress and brushing out her hair before he’s quite recovered from the images she has so idly, so easily branded into his head. William doesn’t have the skill to arrange her hair, but he longs to stroke through her dark curls and pin them away, to fuss with her beautiful soft edges as much as she will let him. But it’s too late anyway; she twists her hair away and secures it with a comb and what must be just a touch of magic, and then she’s telling him not to be long and leaving him alone in a bedroom that used to feel like his own.

* * *

Breakfast is its usual charade: the Boldwoods sit opposite each other and make polite conversation while a maid finishes making up the breakfast table, and then - what a surprise! - Mr Oak arrives early for his morning report to his employers. Could he be persuaded to sit and eat breakfast with them this morning? - he oughtn’t - just this once? - well, if you insist, ma’am. It does not quite escape William that it takes the maid no time at all to set another place; almost as if this near-scripted set piece they have played out most mornings for a month is now an expected aspect of the day.

Mr Boldwood’s role in this little theatre is a silent one; sometimes he smiles encouragingly, or he might pour a cup of tea out for Gabriel as if to thus trap him at their table, but he leaves the persuading itself to Bathsheba’s soft words and enticing smiles. It is a great injustice, but a greater amount of thought has been carefully poured into it during William’s solitary night watches. He had meant it, when he had first broached the subject and said that he would close his ears to all rumours of Bathsheba and Gabriel cuckolding him, and even though the reality is different this rumour is less dangerous to them all than any similar story about Gabriel and William. But this morning he does not even take his usual minor, supporting role; Boldwood fixes his eyes upon his own breakfast and, carefully distant at the head of the table, fades into the background. 

Bathsheba and Gabriel wash over him, voices a mass of noise that William cannot quite parse. He feels oddly absent from himself this morning, listening at his own life; pressing his ear to a shell to hear the sea, and hearing only his own rushing blood echoing back at himself. Perhaps they are tidal, his lovers, surging back and forth on the sands where he, William, stands planted, a rock too solid to shift. They come to him often, but never for long; they are gone before he is ready, clawing waves sucking at his ankles and digging away at the sand beneath his feet. Every tide unbalances him, leaves him sinking deeper into the beach, drowns him in the shingle - and in them.

A thin finger reaches out and prods him, gently, in the temple. He blinks and looks up, parsing from Bathsheba’s crooked smile and the way that Gabriel’s fondness is tinged with concern that he has just been asked a question which he is quite unable to fathom. William sighs and pushes his hand through his hair. “I am sorry; what did you say?”

“We shall endeavour to be more entertaining, dear,” Bathsheba teases, and William makes an effort to keep his flash of irritation internal. It isn’t her fault; he expects teasing from her, delights in it, but not this morning.

“I was wondering whether you and Mrs Boldwood might not like to ride out today,” Gabriel says, gentle in the face of William’s absence of mind. “With a good start, you might be overlooking Bridport by midday.”

“I think it sounds glorious, darling,” Bathsheba says. There is plausible deniability in her words, but William knows that  _ darling _ means  _ Gabriel _ . “I’ll have a picnic put together.”

“Sir?” Gabriel presses gently, and William almost wishes he wouldn’t.

He presses his lips into a thin smile, wrinkling his old eyes to hide their hurt. “You go. I’ve plenty to be getting on with, here. But you two should go; see if I can’t remember how to run my own farm, before you two did me out of a job.” Not grasping. Not too much. William ignores the vertiginous rush of stepping out into an abyss of loss.

Gabriel tilts his head and frowns slightly in silence, like William is a riddle he just can’t puzzle out, but Bathsheba sighs rather expansively. “Oh, please, William. Don’t be grumpy today,” she begs, turning her wide dark eyes on him. “Come out with us. Have a little  _ fun _ for a change.” She’s smiling as she says it, leaning across the table to press his hand in a way that has always left him helpless but to turn under her fingers and hold her hand in his own, but there’s still a sting to the words. He tries to put it aside, offering them a small smile and a shrug of concession, but it itches under his skin like a stray piece of hay caught within his shirt at harvest time. Like sand in his shoes.

“I shall get the horses saddled, then, sir,” Gabriel says, rising with suppressed, childish enthusiasm for the day’s excursion shining through his face with the subtlety of a sunrise.

Bathsheba squeezes William’s hand and lets go. “I will arrange for our lunch. There’s an incentive to ride out, now, hmm?”

William chases her hand as she makes to stand, pressing her palm to the side of his face in the only concession he can presently make to the parts of him that are screaming  _ don’t leave me! _ at his departing lovers. She smiles, rubbing a thumb gently along his cheekbone and scratching softly at the patch of grey sweeping away from his temple. And then she pulls away, and sweeps out in a rush of skirts. Gabriel offers him a quick smile, but then he’s caught up in her orbit and trips out at her heel, and William tries not to hear the devastating nothing with which he is once more left alone.

* * *

The ride out is uneventful. They reside, presently, in a lull; their talk is of what must, in the coming months, be done, but nothing is immediate. Nothing presses. It does not bring the calm to William that such lulls usually do. He has become a grasping Canute, attempting to entice the waves with baubles and occupations so that the tide, bored with the powerless king, does not recede from the shore to never return.

They talk about nothing, really. Bathsheba reaches out and plucks blackberries and sloes from the hedgerow, staining her fingers purple when she offers them to her companions. The berries burst on his tongue, sweet to the back teeth or bitter in his very bones. The sloes aren’t quite ready, are barely sweet at all; but the sweetness is in watching Bathsheba reach for them, watching her shine with plans for sloe gin as she offers her bounty up, watching Gabriel pick the sloes to eat and leaving more blackberries for Bathsheba and William. But it all feels so surface-level: like they are all waiting, endlessly, for someone to break the silence and say something real.

By the end of their lunch, they have run out of nothing to discuss. Bridport, ranged upon the shingle with the waves slowly eroding the shore below them, is bustling with the market and every appearance of normalcy being played out just downhill; it could be miles away, for all that William feels normal, and they do not linger. It looks like rain, clouds ranging over the horizon in dark promise, and there’s a kind of electricity in the air that makes the horses uneasy, shifting their great weights from hoof to hoof and snorting.

Bathsheba launches herself up into her saddle, settling even as her mount dances beneath her. She’s an excellent rider, holds herself like she was born to be there, and what happens next is not her fault. It is not anyone’s fault.

William blinks, and is lying on his back, staring up at the sky in confusion as great fat drops beat steadily against his skin. There has been no build-up to this rain; from nothing at all to sudden deluge took no time at all. Just a sudden flash of light, a cracking roll of thunder like the sky itself was being torn in two, a spooked horse, a well-aimed kick, twin shrill shrieks as a body is knocked backwards…

William blinks again, squinting against the rain, and makes an effort to understand. Bathsheba is still shouting, frantic but distant; Gabriel is - is - he can’t hear him, where is-

“William, William, can you - are you - oh, God-” Gabriel appears suddenly, blocking out the dark and angry sky with pure worry. His eyes flit over William’s face, hands fluttering uselessly around his shoulders, and William, despite everything, feels almost a little better. “How do you feel, love?” Gabriel says, moving his twitching, anxious attention away from his face.

William opens his mouth to answer and finds he cannot; the breath is not there, the words will not come. He is suddenly aware that his lungs are burning, and with every choking, sucked-in breath another part of him comes forward to report terrible, mounting pain.

Bathsheba appears by his head in a rush of wet calico, kneeling in the mud and fussing and hushing. “Oh, my darling, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, William-”

“Hurts,” he wheezes. It’s not what he had meant for his bruised diaphragm to push out of his mouth, but his head is ringing from hitting the floor a little too hard and his stomach feels like a cannonball has blown through it: though neither eloquent nor intentional,  _ hurts _ is not at all inaccurate.

Bathsheba’s face crumples and she dashes a hand quickly under one eye. “I’m so sorry,” she says wetly, and William frowns. There is no need for her to be sorry; it was hardly her fault that the horse spooked, that William was too close, that the consequence of these is pain.

Before he can summon the breath to express this, Gabriel cuts in. “He needs a doctor. There will be one in Bridport - Bathsheba, ride down and find him.”

“No!” William looks between Bathsheba and Gabriel, trying to convey his agreement with her dissent. He has no desire to be prodded and poked by someone he does not know and would much rather just go home. “I’ll not leave him - you go.”

“Bathsheba-”

“Home,” William says firmly, with breath that rattles ever so slightly. “Want - go - home.”

“William-” Gabriel begins, but William is already forcing his elbows under himself, wincing against the screaming pain in his belly to sit up. “William, you can’t - you need a doctor - please!”

Bathsheba flutters anxiously at his side, apparently undecided about helping or hindering William’s escape. He sends her a glance; he will not make it onto a horse on his own. “Help me?”

She makes a face and looks at Gabriel, and William would sigh if he had the lung capacity to spare it. “You really should see a doctor-”

William pushes wet hair off his forehead, plastered to his skull by the endless heavy rain, and pushes himself slowly to stumbling feet. “Go and get one, then,” he grunts, voice dark and cross and thick with hurt. “Both of you, why not.” Crossing the clearing is easy enough, as long as he does not think about the pain, but getting from the ground to the horse’s back with a bellyful of bruises will be-

“William, we aren’t going to leave you alone here,” Bathsheba says, voice almost drowned out by the rain. She sounds so terribly confused, and William has to laugh - a sad, cruel noise that sends sharp knives of pain through him.

“Forgive me,” he grits out. Just hauling his leg into the stirrup is agony, and he has to stand very still for a long moment before he can even consider moving again.

And then there is a tall, solid frame at his shoulder, heaving him up onto the horse’s back. Through his swimming vision, Gabriel looks endlessly, terribly sad; and then the pain is too much, and William slumps against the horse’s warm, solid neck.

* * *

The rain is drumming on a canopy of leaves when he next wakes, the steady rocking of the horse below him sending gentle waves of pain through his stomach. Gabriel has one hand on his, William’s, shoulder to steady him, the other leading Gabriel’s horse; when William shifts his head, he can see Bathsheba leading both his own horse and hers. Neither of them are saying anything at all. The silence sits heavy upon the pair of them like a blanket of snow.

“What do we do to you, William, that makes you think we would leave you on a hilltop in a storm after a horse nearly killed you?”

Gabriel’s voice is carefully controlled. There is no shouting, or crying. It does not ring in the silence, deadened as it is by the trees and the rain. He is perfectly measured.

It feels like William has been kicked in the stomach all over again.

He knows, really, that they would not have done any such thing. Bathsheba and Gabriel would not have left a stranger like that, and William thinks well enough of them to know it. But - he is hurting, and has been long before the storm, and the horse, and the fall.

“You leave me behind,” he says quietly. There is, presently, a dream-like quality to the world, as if the pain is keeping him from entirely inhabiting his own body, and it makes it easier to say painful words. Bathsheba is listening intently, he can tell, for all that she keeps her gaze ahead and away from him. “I understand, I do, but - it can be hard, to be alone.”

Gabriel closes his eyes and winces briefly. “I had thought,” he says carefully, choosing his words with the care needed to step carefully from stone to stone over a terrible, dark abyss, “that we were giving you space which you wanted.”

“Why?” William breathes. The idea - unimaginable. William, who is too much, too grasping, forever clawing them back to him with protectiveness verging on possessive-

“Because you will not sleep with us. Because you pull back,” Bathsheba lists. “Because you try not to come out with us on days like today. Because - what were we supposed to think?” The words burst out of her, and she turns to meet William’s bewildered gaze. “You don’t tell us what is wrong!.”

“But - we’re soulmates,” William’s mouth says, quite without the permission or instruction of his brain. “I’m supposed to just - know. What you want. Because God made me for you.”

There is a long silence, for a moment. The rain hits the leaves heavier for a moment - or perhaps it is just this long and terrible quiet that amplifies each tiny impact. “And so what are we, if we don’t know what you want?” Bathsheba says, very quietly.

“Perfect.” William almost trips over his tongue to say it; there is not anything, in all the world, that could be wrong with Gabriel and Bathsheba, even when there is. “I just - want the wrong things.”

He has always wanted the wrong things. Company, when his father was too busy for him; the great outdoors, when his father was spending so much on his education; to understand the Marks on his skin, when his father was grieving his own loss. He hadn’t known until much later that his parents weren’t Marked as they claimed - or at least, not for each other - but they are still William’s image of True Love: the intuitive obedience and servitude of his mother for her husband and son, knowing without asking what William’s father would next require, when he would want to see his son and when the son should be hidden away, what should be said and what should not. William had tried to learn, but she was always better at loving the elder Mr Boldwood than anyone else. He tries to know what Gabriel and Bathsheba would want, too, but it is miserably difficult. The answer he always turns up is that each of them want the other, so he attempts to provide; but then they insist upon pulling him out with them, like today, and he just doesn’t  _ know. _

And then he cannot help but wonder if there hasn’t been some mistake, somewhere in the universe; crossed strings, twisted thread, and a man who was supposed to love two people but not be loved in return is somehow hurled into happiness, even though he wants the wrong things.

“William, I wish you would talk to us more.” Bathsheba sounds a little too close to tears, but William, slumped over the horse and unable to move, cannot reach her to apologise. “No-one can love like that. And we’ve been hurting you, because we love you, and you won’t see yourself as an equal part of our relationship - probably for the same reason.”

Bewildered, William slides his gaze over to Gabriel. His hand slides up William’s shoulder and settles on his cheek, ever so gentle, and Gabriel smiles with a deep and terrible sadness. “That horse nearly killed you,” he whispers, voice overbrimming with some nebulous, dense emotion. “I’ve never been so scared.”

It is possible that William responds to this: perhaps with some of the concern he feels for poor, worried Gabriel; or with the inside-out warmth of knowing he is loved, is not wrong; or possibly just surprise, at this statement and this afternoon and their love, all of it. But then there’s a jolt underneath him when a stone shifts under his horse, and blackness surges up like a wave and drags him below into the depths.

* * *

He wakes in his bed - no, their bed. There is murmuring in the corridor outside, but his head is twisted on his pillow to press his face into a long dark plait, and he follows it up to bright dark eyes, candlelit and gentle. Bathsheba smiles gently and pushes his hair off his face; his curls have dried out, wild and fluffy, and the gentle combing is pleasant.

William even makes the effort to tell her so, and she laughs softly. “I did know that you like this, yes,” Bathsheba says, rather gently teasing, and William relaxes into the familiar dancing joy of her. The gloom has softened everything in the room, even the pain in his stomach, and it is rather like a beautiful dream.

The murmuring outside stops, and then Gabriel lets himself in. “I have something else for the pain, if- oh. You’re awake.” William offers a small smile, and Gabriel shakes himself out of surprise. “Are you in pain? Can I-”

“Will you-” William and Gabriel cut each other off and stop. Gabriel goes pleasantly pink at the very edges of his cheekbones; William is fairly sure his own face is much redder. He clears his throat, fighting through everything in him which insists that no asking should be required, and tries again. “Will you come here, please?” he manages.

Gabriel is fighting his boots off almost before William has even stopped speaking, lying full-length on William’s other side with a careful six inches separating them. Bathsheba is still giving him space too; in fact, he can’t get closer to one without going further from the other and quite possibly injuring himself in the process.

So he pats the space between them, on both sides, and closes his eyes. “Here, please.”

There is a pause, and William waits for some form of disaster; his brain has already deemed it inevitable.

“Are you sure?” Gabriel says softly, but he has already turned and is pressing closer, the entire length of their bodies touching, shoulder to ankle.

“I cannot move enough; I shan’t do you an injury,” William murmurs around a yawn, already sleepy again.

“I was more worried about you, dear heart,” Bathsheba says, fondness overweighed slightly by amusement, but she too curls in closer and links her hand with Gabriel’s on top of the Mark in the centre of his chest.

The waves come and go, washing at the coast and shifting the pebbles on the shore, and William shifts, and slips out on the tide into sleep.


End file.
